Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

Sorry Trilby, just forget everything I just posted. Somehow when I was trying out ttwm before I copied the executable ttwm to my ~/bin folder and everytime I was making a new pkg the old ttwm in ~/bin was being executed. Duh, I feel real dumb now.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to display my conky but now at least I have the new tabs, numlock works,key combos work, and clock color is responding.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

Cool, glad most of that is working out.

The STATUSBARSPACE option is brand new. What is now "tbars" was hardcoded in before and I just separated them. There are many known quirks I still have to iron out and undoubtedly many unknown quirks still waiting to be found. Currently a dzen/conky bar would have to be lined up with top-righttop-left coordinates of x=70,y=0 (70 may not be exact I'll double check) and a width equal to what you set for STATUSBARSPACE. I only dabbled with conky very briefly and only tried running dzen once. I do not know these tools or if/how they could be best used to fit in the space left by ttwm.

If there are certain requirements or restrictions, or anything that would make it easier to use these tools let me know. I will depend on input for this as, again, I do not use them. No space can currently be reserved on the right half of the screen. This is intentional but need not be permanent. It is intentional as the right side has the stack-tabs which should be more numerous than the single master tab, so the left side seems to be a more fitting place for information bars. But this is just a first draft of the STATUSBARSPACE setting.

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

I just pushed some changes that now calculate statusbar sizes/positions based on the selected font. So, among other improvements, the workspace indicators should not overlap the clock with any font choice. I have not, however, tested this with any other fonts than those I use - feedback would be appreciated.

edit for better info: The changes to the config.h are limited to the first handful of lines - these should be easy to merge with any custom config. As suggested by the comment line, barheight is now a variable and is optional. If it is set to 0 (zero) the barheight is set as the font ascent + descent + 2 for one pixel above and below the text. You can set any other barheight you'd like if you want a bulkier or slimmer bar.

----------

bgc, it would be pretty easy to read the root window name and put that text up in the status region. What would be much harder is having color codes and formatting in the text. There is a massive amount of code in dwm that is dedicated to just that functionality.

I will not add this back in to ttwm itself, though I can imagine having a complimentary tool to do this for those who want it. But this would then essentially be yet-another-dzen program. That does sound like a fun project that I might take on at some point, but given the abundance of existing tools to do just this, I'd just suggest going with one of them.

In addition to dzen I think moetunes somesortabar does something like this. There are a number of others too.

EDIT: OK, I guess I don't really know why dwm needed so much code for this. TTWM now can read from its stdin or a program passed as its first argument and display incoming information in the status bar with colors and more.

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

@Trilby:

The statusbar changes work great with good, old terminus-font from community repo--the spacing is much better and the workspace indicator doesn't overlap the clock anymore. Thx. Like I said, just forget about the piped conky since it sounds like more trouble than its worth. After all, the point of the whole exercise is to keep it tiny, right!

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Rectabar reads input from stdin, can colorize text, draw shapes (rectangles), and overlap any of these for some nice drawing effects ... all in 87 lines of C. There is a short demo with it on github which shows some of what it can do while demonstrating the syntax for the brace-commands (i.e. "{command}") if you view the script contents.

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

Yes, it is weird. I can git clone ttwm no problem. Don't know what's going on at my end as you guys don't seem to have a problem. But I got copy and paste to work so I'm playing around with rectabar. It doesn't seem to like conky input for me but I am trying out other methods and have some cpu, ram and temp input that I'm fine tuning. Conky is simpler but I needed something to do this morning anyway. I like tinkering too.

And BTW, your demos are very cool!

Last edited by bgc1954 (2012-10-08 17:53:11)

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

Conky doesn't send color codes to stdout -- we have to use dzen2 to get a colored conky. And the braces don't get output unless someone puts them in the plain text. ${command argument} is a conky command and the braces are not printed. If rectabar uses similar syntax, conky may be confused if there are rectabar commands in the TEXT.

Sorry for the long post full of stuff you already knew... I'm happy enough with dzen2 that I haven't even tried rectabar. If I find some time I'll try to test it.

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

Rectabar works fine. It killed a few hours with me trying to input the same kind of stuff as conky with a bash script--I'm not the best script writer but I cobbled together some stuff which rectabar dutifully displayed in ttwm. Conky/dzen is easier to work with for me, but rectabar is a great alternative if someone wants to display bars--I kind of like plain old text.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

@Trilby:

Just noticed something while in firefox. I was trying to view pics my daughter sent me and when the new window opens to either view or download the pic, the OK button was grayed out. When I hit mod+up to switch to monocle mode, the ok button was there again and I could view the pic. The next pic I tried to view, the OK button was grayed out in the monocle window and when I hit mod+down to switch back to multiple windows, I got the OK button back again or if I switch windows using mod+j/k I could get the OK button back. Haven't used ttwm enough to know if this is regular behavior since focus is keyboard driven but in monocle mode it doesn't seem that when opening a new window the focus should shift to the new window... or not?

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

I've found that this focus behavior is easy to replicate if trying to download a file--like arch.iso--in firefox. The OK in the window will be grayed out until you shift away to another window and then back again. Happens every time. Funny enough, apps like midori or pcmanfm seem to gain focus when opening a new window without this behavior??

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

Odd. I don't have firefox on my work computer, and I was unable to replicate this with any other program. I just got home and tried firefox on my home computer, and I still can't replicate it in either master+stack or monocle mode.

Given that you both experience this, it certainly is a problem, but I don't know how to investigate further until I can replicate it. Do you see similar problems with any other programs?

I did look back at the relevant code, and it should work as desired. The troublesome bits I was frustrated with previously were only really when windows were closed or workspaces changed.